Digital Touch

Resuscitating this deeper sense of intimacy here is rather an attempt to highlight a tacit aspect of the earlier considerations of screens, surfaces, screening surfaces and so forth - trying to enter the interiority, neither here nor there, of virtuality … one that is no longer flat contact between two integuments, a closeness and possession negotiated through touch, but rather a more penetrative possession.

                                                                            Tavi Meraud, ‘Iridescence, Intimacies’, 2015

…all touching entails an infinite alterity, so that touching the other is touching all others, including the self, and touching the self entails touching the strangers within. Even the smallest bits of matter are an unfathomable multitude.

                                                                                           Karen Barad, ‘On Touching’, 2012

With the demand for social distancing and self-isolation in response to Covid-19, the pandemic forces us to reconsider what it means to touch. As intimacy and contact move beyond the physical space into the digital, how do we touch beyond close proximity? What does it mean to touch and to be touched-at-a-distance? And how do such actions, permeated through technology affect communication and interaction? 

Though seemingly juxtaposed fields, touch (representative of a physicality) and the digital (an artificiality) have always been intertwined. The etymology of the word digital derives from the Latin ‘digitus’ meaning finger or touch.  This given hapticity to the digital blurs the  clear cut dichotomies of what is considered im/material, real/artificial and touchable/untouchable.  Digital Touch, then, asks what it means to interact with and feel another through the screen?

For Esther Leslie, the liquid and fluid movement of  liquid crystals in an LCD screen melts the flatness and transparency of the screen, and shatters the monolithic concretization or projection of the apparent reality or surface of things.  In redefining our understanding of surfaces as an ‘accretion’,  interior/exterior negotiation, Leslie re-thinks intimacy beyond direct contact or closeness in proximity, moving towards what Tavi Meraud calls ‘transintimacy’ to include the possibility of techno and electronic love.

Similarly, Karen Barad introduces the term ‘Intra-actions’ as a way of undermining the causal implications attached to interactions, where individual entities come to touch one another. Barad argues that ‘relata do not prexist relations’ but rather intra-actions gives agency to doings or actions which appear in momentary stabilizations rather than beings.  In the essay ‘On Touching’, Karen Barad radically undermines conventional understandings of physical touch by arguing that touch does not in fact require direct contact. In relation to quantum entanglements, Barad argues that when touching a coffee mug, there is an ‘electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons of the atoms that make up your fingers and those that make up the mug.’ Barad concludes: ‘try as you might, you cannot bring two electrons into direct contact with each other […Instead,] electrons meet each other “halfway”, when they intra-act with one another, when they touch one another.’  The measures of closeness in relation to physical touch is inherently undermined by this notion of electromagnetic repulsion being at the heart of attraction,  thus allowing for an exploration of what it means to digitally touch another. 

Digital Touch is an online exhibition existing on the Conscious Isolation Instagram between the 6th and 31st of August 2020. It explores the dynamics between physical and digital bodies where interconnectivity describes a perceived tactility.  Drawing from Meraud and Barad’s understanding of transintimacy and intra-actions this exhibition brings together 22 contemporary artists with unique  practices to question ways in which touch and intimacy are experienced through the screen.

Existing as a series of continuous long-length films on InstaLives and InstaStories the exhibition also brings into focus questions of ‘liveness’, ‘excess’ and ‘authorship’ in present digital culture, reflecting on Instagram's use (and overuse) as an alternative exhibition and intra-active space of production.

As part of its public programme, the project will integrate artists' talks and workshops expanding on the exhibition’s theme every Tuesday and Friday. This project is  produced in collaboration with the Conscious Isolation platform  (@consciousisolation)

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